Saturday, December 12, 2015

Fun Food for Your Festive Mood!

The holiday season is upon us and this means most of us are looking to Pinterest for ways to help our children enjoy this magical time of year! We like to make edible crafts in our classroom. The children LOVE to make the food crafts and of course eat them too! We found a few snacks that we thought we would love to try. We would like to share them with you too! Enjoy!

Who loves Rice Krispie Treats? These trees are a fun twist for your Christmas festivities in the classroom!

We followed the original Rice Krispie Treat recipe and added green food coloring to the marshmallows after melting them. We formed the mixture into a cone shape to create a green tree.

The children did the rest...icing, ornaments, eating! (If your classroom is allowed to have peanut products, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are a perfect addition for the tree trunk.) This fun snack has so many possibilities depending on your toppings offered...several children even wanted to add a star. They loved these trees!

These were easy for the children to make and didn't require much prep, other than cutting some Mike and Ike's in half. The children loved creating their colorful string of lights!

The Mike and Ike halves stick right onto the almond M & M's...looking just like a large lightbulb!

Then, just arrange on the Twizzler Pull n' Peel string. We were going to have them attach the lights with frosting, but they didn't stick well, so we found it wasn't worth the hassle. :-)

Voila! Beautiful lights!

These were a cute idea and something pretty healthy, but a little harder for the children to create. They had trouble getting the bananas and strawberries to stay in a candy cane shape, possibly because the bananas are a bit slippery when sliced. However, they loved eating them!

First, we rinsed the strawberries:

Then we cut the strawberries:

Next, we cut the bananas:

The next step was to work with a friend to build the candy cane:

At last, our favorite part......time to eat!!!

These tasty Santa treats were a hit with our children and very easy for them to assemble! All of these food crafts are fun for the children, but they're also easy for teachers to see how well students listen and follow directions and use a model to help them also.

Just slice off the top, creating a flat end of the strawberry. Then, slice the strawberry in half, creating a Santa body and a hat. Now, fill a layer of Cool Whip, put his strawberry hat on top, add another dollop of Cool Whip on top, add two eyes....and eat!

(Tip: We used a piping bag for the Cool Whip after finding that Reddi-Whip from a can did not work well at all. Perhaps it was too light to be able to hold Santa's hat up.)

Here is another healthy alternative, a Banana Santa! You will need bananas, strawberries, tiny bit of frosting, mini chocolate chips, and mini M&Ms!

We saw a picture of one similar to this on Pinterest. In this one all the layers of Santa were stacked on top of each other and then held together with a tooth pick. We tried it this way first:

This proved to be difficult for the children. The pieces kept sliding around and falling off. They would get the hat on and then an eye would fall off. Then they would get the eye back on and the hat would fall off. It was a hot mess! Haha.

So, instead, we cut each of the pieces in half so it would lay flat on their plate. Problem solved! The children were able to make them very easily and then enjoyed eating them even more!

These reindeer brownies are just too cute and super easy! Excuse our brownies, we had a little trouble with them getting stuck to the pan, hahaha!! After mixing, we baked the brownies in a cake pan. You can do this at home before hand or mix them with the children. We are fortunate enough to have an oven in the shared area between our classrooms. The children did the rest! They added a red M&M for Rudolph's nose, two green M&Ms for his eyes, and then pretzels for his antlers. Lastly, the got to eat it! Yum! They were delicious!

Thank you for stopping by and reading all about our fun week of eating! We hope you can use some of these ideas in your classroom too! Enjoy the time with your students before your winter break!